A Look at Steam’s Hardware Survey for August 2012

Posted on September 5, 2012 8:00 AM by Rob Williams

The worst thing about summer is that it ends, but as we look ahead to the fall, we hold hope that there are going to be a lot of stellar games for PC released. At the very least, we have Borderlands 2 set to drop in a couple of weeks, yet another Call of Duty (Black Ops II) and even another Painkiller (Hell and Damnation). Then of course there will be many console ports for us all to push our hardware to the limits with. Sigh, two depressing statements in one paragraph – I’m on a roll.

Taking a look at the just-updated Steam Hardware Survey, we can see that not too much has changed between July and August. The most eye-catching shift has to do with both GPUs and OSes. The number of those equipped with a DX11 card and also Windows 7 rose from 45.85% to 47.7%, and the number of those with DX10 + Windows 7 leaped to 33.6% to 40.39%. Wait… what?

According to Steam, a huge number of people seem to be upgrading to Windows 7 – right before the launch of Windows 8. That’s the only explanation that fits here, since those building brand-new machines would assuredly be equipped with a DirectX 11 card – not DX10. Admittedly, some more fact would be nice, so look no further than the current 4.38% that use a DX10 GPU and Windows XP – down from 12.3% just a month ago (note that these results always encompass the previous six months).

CPU brand usage has almost moved not at all, though the shift did move towards AMD’s favor. Core-wise, not much has changed there either, though it’s not expected we’d see something notable. 1 and 2-core CPUs continue their ever-so-slow descend while quad stand to gain.

For some reason, this month’s update killed off the list of specific GPU listings, so we’re unable to dealve into those. We’ll save that for next month, and hope they work then. For now, you can either relish the thought that Windows XP usage is plummeting at an alarming rate, or you can shed a tear over the same fact.

For even more stats, be sure to check out the latest update on the Steam site, and as a friendly reminder, don’t forgot to join our Steam group while there!